The Death of My Brother

Reports

I walked into the room of my apartment and slowly closed the door. My head aches from the lack of sleep and water I've had. I don't tend to my body's yearning for food or rest, but instead sit at my desk. I stare at the monitor for a minute before turning it on.

The News Report is still open on my computer. It's been three days since the report was uploaded. Three days since he died.

I close my eyes. I can still picture every detail, every part of the scene is engraved in my brain. Every last horrifying detail remains burned into my mind's eye. I can't blink without seeing it.

I had entered his apartment to surprise him. He was about to go on tour. It was his last day here before he got on the plane and left.

I went to say goodbye and invite him to lunch. We were going to go to his favorite cafe. It was supposed to be a nice evening before he left in the morning.

As soon as I opened the door, I knew something was wrong. He never left his door unlocked. He was almost paranoid about the door being unlocked, always reminding me and our friends to lock it when we entered. It had always struck us as odd, but we never mentioned it.

"Will?" I called out. There was no response. I glanced around the empty living room and kitchen, searching for any sign of him. I was only met with silence.

My senses felt as though they were heightened. Every subtle sound, smell, taste, felt greatly magnified. My heart pounded as I began to walk forward. Every footstep sounded louder than anything I had heard before.

I walked towards his bedroom and stopped at the closed door. I rested my hand on the door handle, the feeling of it in my hands seeming somewhat wrong. This seemed like crossing a boundary.

Under normal circumstances, I wouldn't have felt as hesitant as I did. But today, everything that would normally seem normal and fun felt off and wrong.

It was probably because these weren't normal circumstances.

I kept my hand on the door handle and knocked with my other hand. If I was doing this, I would at least give a warning. "Will?" I called again, this time feeling my fear begin to leak into my voice. There was no response. "I'm coming in, alright?" Again, the only thing I heard from the other side was silence.

I sighed. He was going to probably kill me for entering his room like this, but I had to. I had to see if he was here.

As I opened the door, it occured to me that maybe he wasn't even home. He could have left his apartment to run an errand and forgotten to lock his door. I felt a bit silly for worrying, but it was too late now.

I froze when I saw what was in the bedroom. Every part of me felt ice cold. I stood still for a few seconds, petrified with shock and horror.

I imagine this is what it feels like right before you die. Time seems to slow, and your last few seconds feel like hours. You see, hear, and feel every bit of it, every tangible and intangible thing being absorbed. It's something that would stay with you for the rest of your life, except you wouldn't have anymore of it to live.

You would be dead.

I will always remember the look on his face, the rigidity of his body. It was horribly stiff, and it looked disfigured. Mangled. His limbs bent at wrong angles, sticking out in unnatural ways.
And his face...

His face was contorted in a look of pure horror. It was a face that had seen something scarring, something so utterly terrifying it echoed through your very being.

I wonder if that's how my face looked then, when I found him.

I can't really remember the next few moments well. My body seemed to move on autopilot, while my brain froze, still trying to process the information. I don't remember making the call, or telling them the address, or walking out the door.

I just remember finding myself outside, watching the gurney take his body away. The sheet was pulled over his face, hiding the horrible expression forever stuck there.

Phil arrived a few minutes later to take me back to his house. I don't remember him speaking to me in the car. If he did, I couldn't hear him.

The article went up a few hours later. I was sitting in Phil's spare bedroom, waiting for him to bring a spare blanket he had.

I scrolled through the article.

Influencer and Musician William Gold found dead in his home at age 23.

There were a few details about his life and career scattered throughout the article, but its main focus was on the mysterious circumstances in which his body was found. The police were still investigating, and they planned on performing an autopsy to figure out the cause of death.

Phil and I went to the morgue two days later to speak with the coroner. I don't remember much about the whole conversation, just that some weird sounding drug came up on his bloodwork.

As we left, I overheard a few nurses whispering to each other about him. "It's tragic," one said, "how these musicians keep killing themselves." Another nurse bit into her candy bar and responded with, "The fame just becomes too much for them, I suppose."

I wanted to scream at them, to tell them about how he would never have killed himself, no matter what they said. He wasn't that kind of person, he wouldn't have done that to himself. To us.

Phil squeezed my shoulder and just quietly shook his head. I looked down at the floor, trying to focus on the tiles and not the burning pain in my chest.

They said that the cause of death was cardiac arrest. Some sort of heart attack. But I knew better than to believe that.

The look on his face. The broken frame of his body. It couldn't have been a heart attack that left him like that.

Now sitting at my computer, I stared at the news article and made a decision.

I was going to figure out what happened to Wilbur.

And the first step to doing that was to go back to his apartment.